Whenever you type an email address in the To/CC/BCC field of an email, Outlook helps out by showing you a list of email addresses that match what you have typed. This can be very helpful in quickly entering a recipient’s email address. But …

People’s email addresses change or you may have stopped communicating with certain people – yet their old email addresses keep showing up in the list.

Deleting Single Entries
It’s easy to delete individual items from the list. Type a few characters in the To field to display the list. Then use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move to the old email addresses and click Delete.

Deleting the Whole ListUse with Caution because there is no way of getting the list back!
You can also completely delete the list to start from a clean slate by following the steps in this link:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287623/en-us

Over the last few weeks I have noticed that spammers have started more and more spam email from YOUR or MY email address. The email is from YOU and also to YOU. Chances are you have your email address white-listed. Here’s a little trick I use to stop these emails from getting into my Inbox.

Here’s how you can move the spam emails out of your Inbox but still keep the real emails you have emailed yourself.

Decide on a few characters that you will type in the Subject of every email that you send yourself. Keep it simple as you want to be able to type these characters from your BlackBerry etc as well. Use something like QAZ or whatever is easy for you to type.

Any time you send yourself an email type those characters in the Subject e.g. Instead of “Pick Stuff from Supermarket”, you would need to type (say) “QAZ Pick Stuff From Supermarket”.

Need to make sure that you get something done… EMAIL YOURSELF! This works much better for me then putting it on a Task List. Why? Like many people my Inbox acts as my real (or at least more immediate) Task List.

Here are some ways to get the most out of this super easy tip.

Basic Way: Just Email yourself when you need to remember to do something.

Need to follow up on an email that you are sending out to a client: BCC yourself on the email and a copy will end up in your Inbox.

From your BlackBerry or other email-enabled phone: This is my FAVOURITE. It means that I can update my To Do List from anywhere… I’m at the supermarket and remember that I need to call a client on Monday… easy… I create and send an email from my phone… and I can get back to chasing my 4 year old down the candy aisle.

Did you find this tip useful? Do you have your own creative ways of applying this tip. Leave a comment on the blog.

If like me, you use Outlook Tasks and Appointments to manage your time, here are a few easy-to-implement tips that will save you a lot of time.

These tips came about as a result of my laziness(as most shortcuts do)… I don’t like having to switch to Outlook and then making the appropriate clicks to open the new Task or Appointment screen… there had to be a better way.

I wanted to either click a button on the Windows Quick Launch bar and/or use keyboard shortcuts that would work even when I wasn’t in Outlook.

(For those who are not familiar with the Quick Launch bar… it is the set of icons that you have just beside the Windows Start button. If it is not displayed, right-click on the horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen, click Toolbars and tick Quick Launch.)

Shortcut to create a new Task/Appointment

1. Right-click on any empty space on your desktop and click New-Shortcut.
2. In the location box, click Browse and locate your Outlook.exe file. You will then need to add some switches to the end of it telling Windows that you want Outlook to open the new Task screen instead of just opening Outlook. The path to the Outlook.exe would vary depending on your version of Outlook. (If you installed in the default location then the paths will be as follows)

If you are using Outlook 2010:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\OUTLOOK.EXE” /c ipm.task

If you are using Outlook 2007:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE” /c ipm.task /a

If you are using Outlook 2003:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\OUTLOOK.EXE” /c ipm.task /a

3. Click Next and type in a name for the shortcut. By default OUTLOOK.EXE is displayed. I changed mine to New Task.
4. Click Finish.
5. Now right-click over the newly created icon and click Properties.
6. If you want to use keyboard shortcuts to open the application, click on the Shortcut Key field and press the combination of keys that you want to use (I use Ctrl-Shift-T)
7. Click Change Icon and select the Task icon so that the icon is a bit more meaningful.
8. Click OK (and OK again) to return to your desktop.
9. Now right-click and drag and drop the new shortcut to your Quick-Launch bar. On my Vista computer I found that I had to leave of a copy of the shortcut on the desktop if I wanted the keyboard shortcuts to work i.e. I had to Copy the shortcut and not Move it off the desktop.

Now whenever I need to create a new Task, I either click on the New Task button on my Quick-Launch bar or I press Ctrl-Shift-T.

You can use the same steps as above to create a new Appointment … but change the location field to read:

If you are using Outlook 2010:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\OUTLOOK.EXE” /c ipm.appointment

If you are using Outlook 2007:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE” /c ipm.appointment /a

If you are using Outlook 2003:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\OUTLOOK.EXE” /c ipm.appointment /a

But … I prefer the following shortcut for appointments

Shortcut to open the Calendar folder

I need to see my existing appointments before I create a new appointment… here’s a shortcut that opens Outlook with the Calendar displayed.

The steps to do this are identical to what is described above. The only difference is that the location field changes to: (Depending on the version of Outlook you are using the name “Office14” in the path below will change. If you are using Outlook 2007, it will be Office12. If you are using Outlook 2003, it will be Office11)

I think Outlook’s Junk Email Folder does a fantastic job of keeping spam out of my Inbox but … occasionally real emails end up there. Here’s a quick tip to reduce the number of emails that get incorrectly moved to the Junk Email folder.

Outlook has a Safe Sender’s list. Outlook knows that anyone who is on your Safe Sender’s list is authorised to send you email.

It makes sense (most of the time) that anyone you actually write to should automatically be put on your safe sender’s list.

The ability to do this is built into Outlook but is turned off by default. To turn it on…

Go to your Inbox.

If you are using Outlook 2010, (on the ribbon) click File–Junk–Junk E-mail Options
For other versions of Outlook, (on the menu) click Actions – Junk Email – Junk Email Options

Click the Safe Senders tab.

Tick the checkbox “Automatically add people I e-mail to the Safe Senders List”.

This happened to me yesterday. I used Outlook’s auto-complete feature to select an email address while addressing my email and selected the wrong person. I ended up sending the email to completely the wrong person.

My Outlook is configured to send out emails automatically and I wasn’t able to stop it … although I realised my mistake within seconds of clicking Send.

Luckily for me, the content of the email wasn’t confidential so there was no real damage done. But things could have been worse …

You can setup Outlook to only send out emails according to your preset schedule or when you click Send&Receive.

To turn off automatic sends:

If you are using Outlook 2010, (on the ribbon) click File–Options. Click the Advanced section and then scroll down to “Send and Receive”.
If you are using earlier versions of Outlook, (on the menu) click Tools–Options. Click the Mail Setup tab.

Remove the tick next to “Send immediately when connected“

Option 2: Delay all outgoing emails in your Outbox for (say) 30 seconds – this is what I have now implemented

It is possible to do this manually but it has to be done for every email you write … I am way to lazy for a manual solution … it’s not going to happen.

Instead I use the Delay Guard feature in SendGuard 4 Outlook to delay all my outgoing emails by 30 seconds. The settings screen is shown below.

I have set it up so that it asks me if I want the email delayed whenever I click Send (if you find the message intrusive, just remove one tick on the settings screen for all emails to be automatically delayed without the message)

Why 30 seconds? I find that I realise within 30 seconds of clicking Send if there’s something wrong with the email I just sent. After 30 seconds I’ve moved on to something else and the email would have been sent out any way.